


Runner

by aebleskiver



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Coming Out, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Fix-It, Getting Together, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, The Kissing Bridge (IT), The Losers Club (IT) Love Each Other, clown related trauma, eddie with tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:03:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21967255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aebleskiver/pseuds/aebleskiver
Summary: Eddie has tattoos. Richie doesn't quite know what to make of them.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 14
Kudos: 289





	Runner

**Author's Note:**

> i told myself i wasn't gonna write a fix-it but then i saw james ransone's tattoos and had an epiphany and here we are. whatever!
> 
> this is sort of a sequel to my last fic _Needle and a Knife_ but can definitely be read separately I think. However some events from that fic are referenced here.
> 
> thanks for reading!! <33

When all is said and done, it ends up as just another scar. Blood runs backwards, time turns back, but the past is not quite erased. They find this out when they take Eddie to the emergency room, just in case, and discover that while the wound in his chest had inexplicably healed as they carried him away from Neibolt, it’s left a sizable white scar through his solar plexus and out his back, just to the right of his spinal column. A nurse, as perplexed as the rest of them, gives him a clean bill of health, and offers a mirror to Eddie when he refuses to believe her. 

“It must be whatever healed the scars on our hands,” Mike says, shrugging. The six of them are crammed into the curtained off room Eddie has been allotted—all of them still caked with dirt and blood and sweat. Richie, boneless with exhaustion, sinks onto a gurney, legs hanging off the side. 

Eddie is the only one left standing, pulling his bloodstained t-shirt over his head so he can get a look at his chest. 

“So that was a close call,” he says, fingers sliding over the knotted, raised skin above his heart. “Wasn’t it?”

“Fucking understatement of the century,” Richie mutters, crossing his arms. A sore muscle tweaks in his shoulder—predictably, perhaps, since he’d dragged Eddie out of that fucking house and the Losers had dragged him. But he had not let go. 

Bev looks to him, now, concern in her eyes, but Richie looks away. 

Eddie turns around to get a glimpse of the backside of the scar, then shakes his head in disappointment. “Right through the tattoo,” he laments, fingering the now ragged edge of the mangled design. Richie can’t quite tell what it was—something dark and rectangular, with a few strips of color. Maybe the outline of a cassette tape. 

“Eddie,” Richie says, but something cracks in his voice and then he can’t find the words. 

Luckily, Bill does. “Dude, you almost fucking died. Get over the tattoo.”

“Fuck you, man, it cost two hundred dollars.”

Richie laughs at that, a little hysterical, because if he doesn’t laugh than something else is going to fall out of his mouth and it might be a sob. Eddie gives him a long look but doesn’t say a word.

Later, when Richie is lying awake at the Inn with the night pressing in from all corners of the room, he thinks again about the tattoo. Or rather, tattoos. Plural. They don’t square with the Eddie he remembers—the one that was germ-obsessed and needle-phobic and convinced of the fundamental immorality of anyone who would submit to anything so unhygienic. And yet something has changed. After nearly thirty years, perhaps that is only fair. Of course things have changed. Of course. 

Richie would like to find some evidence of change within himself, but nothing readily comes to mind.

Eddie’s physique is not terribly surprising. In the horror of the moment, taking in the scar and his almost-death, Richie had not given Eddie’s well-defined muscles much thought, but now he dwells. It is not hard to picture Eddie in the early hours of the morning, drinking green juice between jogs on a treadmill in some elite Manhattan gym. Complete mastery over the body—perhaps the only solution to Eddie’s hypochondria. He would want control over aging, over inevitable decay. His doctor would have told him to improve his aerobic fitness and Eddie would have leapt into action, even if it meant puffing endlessly on his inhaler. Richie can picture it all with a certain fondness. This is an Eddie he understands. 

The tattoos, however, are too dissonant. There is a difference between the Eddie he once knew and the Eddie he’s faced with now, and the paradox of knowing and not knowing sends a shiver through him that he doesn’t know how to contend with. In the room above him, he hears Eddie’s feet pad across the floor. Awake, just like him, and pacing. There’s a lot to process about these last few days; sleep isn’t coming easy for any of the Losers, but they’re unwilling to leave Derry, leave each other, quite yet. 

Richie slumps out of his bed and digs around in his suitcase until he finds the pack of stale cigarettes stashed in the bottom. Then he’s trotting for the staircase and the back patio, where a few anemic weeds are wending their way up through the concrete. A morning glow is just beginning to appear on the horizon, and it comforts him. Night in Derry has always scared him. He’s remembering that, now—the way the silence would hum, turn his insides cold, the shadows lingering in a way they never did anywhere else. He’s remembering a lot of things.

He closes his eyes against the smoke leaking from his mouth. There’s less fear, now. It’s not gone, but there’s less of it. It feels farther away.

When he hears footsteps behind him, he doesn’t have to look to know it’s Eddie. 

“You’re gonna give yourself cancer with that shit,” Eddie says, but there’s no vigor to his words. He’s quiet, standing on the threshold in plaid pajama bottoms and a t-shirt, tattoos peeking out from both his biceps, and another tracing around his left forearm. 

Richie pulls the cigarette from his mouth and looks at it incredulously. “I survive the murderous clown and _this_ is gonna kill me? I doubt it. I think I’m invincible.”

He thinks about adding _and you are too,_ but the words clutter in his throat.

Because there was a moment down there where he thinks Eddie may have been dead. He might have been, and it’s possible Eddie doesn’t know and shouldn’t know a thing like that. He had been quiet and still, much like he is now, but Richie is not thinking about that. Because they got Eddie out, and he’s fine now. They both are.

Eddie crosses from the door and settles down beside him. Richie is aware that if he inhaled deeply, or perhaps just slumped a little, their shoulders would touch. He does no such thing.

“I think I want to thank you,” Eddie is saying, his eyes on the horizon. He looks uncomfortable with the sincerity in his own voice. “For not leaving me down there.”

“Of course, man,” Richie says quickly, giving him a lame pat on the knee and withdrawing speedily. He doesn’t want to talk about this—doesn’t want to picture himself beneath Neibolt anymore, kneeling over Eddie, watching the blood weep from his chest. 

“No, I’m serious,” Eddie says, turning his gaze fully on him. “The others...I know they wanted to save me, if they could have. But you did. You pulled me out.”

Richie looks hard down at his shoes. He swallows, grinds the cigarette beneath his toe, and forces out, “You would have done the same for me.”

Eddie pauses for a moment, looking at him, then nods. Conceding the point. He rubs his hands together, and Richie notes the creases at the knuckles, the defined veins. The hands of a man, not a boy. So much time has passed. 

“I’m gonna try to get some sleep,” Richie finds himself saying. He rises to his feet, both knees clicking. Eddie says nothing, and when Richie looks back he hasn’t moved from the spot where they sat a moment before.

The weekend comes and they’re all still in Derry, partaking in meals at Mike’s eccentric loft and wandering around town during the day, visiting all the old haunts. The barrens, the clubhouse, the quarry when the sun finally slithers out from behind the clouds. It is necessary, he thinks, to see these places now that the threat has seeped out of them, to recontextualize them in his memory as innocent rather than tainted by fear. But then Bill says something about having a look at what remains of the arcade and Richie must quickly dissuade him of this with a brusque, “There’s nothing to see there. Just garbage.”

The quarry holds their attention; on Sunday morning they’re back at it again, leaping off the ledge in their underwear. No one seems to have thought to bring a bathing suit on their clown-killing vacation. Richie hesitates, at the edge, and remembers that first time—Eddie had had to push him off, then. He’d been eleven years old and scared and unwilling to admit it, but Eddie had pushed him and then leapt off himself without a flicker of anxiety. 

Now, Eddie has tattoos on his wiry left thigh and on the back of his taut right calf. Richie is unwilling to look at his legs long enough to discern what they are, and then Eddie is running, morphing into a streak of disturbed air before he plunges off the side and into the water. 

Once they’re all in the water he thinks that he might have been wrong about time after all, about the way it flows. Because hardly a thing has changed. He lifts Bev on his shoulders to do battle with Bill and Ben while Eddie and Mike pursue a turtle swimming for its life to their left. His mouth collects splashing water whenever he parts his lips to laugh. They race, wrestle, pretend to drown and reanimate. There’s been no discussion, and yet they’ve so quickly settled into the old roles. A previous life resuscitated. 

“Guys, my glasses,” Richie says, coming up for air after Mike has dunked him with particular vigor. “I can’t see for shit now. Like, worse than when I was a kid.”

“Yeah, you guys know how I used to have that hamstring that would always get pulled?” Bill asks, letting out a demure laugh. “Now it just aches constantly. Every fucking morning.”

“I’ve got that same exact thing in my back,” Beverly agrees. “Being old is such a bummer.”

And then they’re adults again, and it feels silly to be standing around discussing aches and pains while chest deep in foggy green water. They begin to migrate back toward the shore, the conversation segueing into other worldly topics—Ben starts talking about his workout regimen and Bev wonders how he finds the time for it with such a hellish commute but he says it’s worth it for the value per square foot of his new place and Bill inquires about the rate he must pay in property tax and Richie just sighs, trailing after them, knowing the spell is broken. 

Then Eddie surfaces beside him, pressing the lost glasses into Richie’s palm without a word and marching resolutely toward the shore.

When the sun has begun to dip below the horizon they deem themselves dry enough to dress and trek back toward town, but too late Richie realizes that the shortcut they’ve opted for will take them past Stan’s old house. No one says anything—their version of a hive mind. They pause collectively at the mouth of the driveway and crane their heads up at the darkened windows. 

“His parents moved to Florida a few months ago,” Mike says, arms crossed tight across his chest. “I came over to say goodbye. They said he bought them the beach house after he made partner. They were so proud of him.”

There’s a moment of tense silence and then Bev asks, “Did anyone move in after them?”

Mike gives a tight shake of his head. “It’s still on the market.”

The key is where it always used to be, under the wilting pot of rhododendrons on the front stoop. It’s Richie who makes a beeline for it, the rest of them following behind in wordless agreement as he cracks open the sticky front door. In the foyer, they find only dust in the place of familiar furniture items. The others fan out across the first floor but Richie trots immediately up two flights of stairs to Stan’s attic bedroom, breathless by the time he arrives, due in part to some strange kind of anticipation. He doesn’t know what he expects to find. Or rather he knows what he wants as much as he knows he won’t receive it: Stan, smiling and young, standing at the windows with his binoculars raised to his face, ignoring all of them in favor of the cardinal on the branch beside his window. 

Instead, Richie finds an empty room.

He could cry right now, he knows. He could do it, if he gave it any thought, and it’s a feeling he’s had pretty much nonstop since arriving in Derry: a volatility lurking beneath his skin, quivering in his gut. Tears scraping the backs of his eyes with every blink. He decides he will not cry until he realizes he already sort of is.

He and Mike and Stan had spent a lot of time up here, drinking and playing cards and imagining prosperous futures, once it was just the three of them left to muscle their way through the rest of high school in Derry. Bev was lost to Portland, then the Denbroughs to New Hampshire and Ben to a Vermont boarding school and finally Eddie once his mom got sick and they had to relocate to a Boston suburb for access to better healthcare. He’s remembering it all, now—their slow, painful dissolution from seven to three, and then he and Stan had bolted for college and left Mike alone and then they began to forget. The unfairness of it all hits him at once. Tears are still leaking down his nose. 

It’s Eddie who finds him like this, staring at the floor and waiting for his breath to even out again. 

“Hey, Rich, you alright?” Eddie says, and the gentleness in his voice only upsets Richie further. But he swallows and nods and wipes his face and then registers Eddie’s hand, resting patiently on his arm. 

“M’fine,” he murmurs, waiting for one of them to step away the way they would have as kids—always carefully stepping around each other, far too aware of the significance of touch. The way a casual brush of the shoulders becomes a commodity when rationed. 

“A lot of memories,” Eddie is saying, nodding pensively. “They’re all coming back.”

“It’s shit you wouldn’t believe you could forget, right?” Richie says. “I spent eighteen fucking years here. Gone.”

“I’m sorry I left you guys,” Eddie says, kicking at a shredded newspaper rolling across the floor. 

“You had no choice,” Richie replies, attempting an unaffected shrug. 

“What happened after I left?”

Richie thinks back to those last few years in Derry, and finds only a haze punctuated by the banalities of high school. He went to parties with Stan and Mike during the winter and in the summer they all three worked on farm with Mike’s grandfather and saved up for cars and took tests and occasionally got the shit kicked out of them by whatever bully had most recently taken offense to their mere existence. He took some girl to prom, remembers her face and the red of her dress but not her name. He sat down to try and write a letter to Eddie more than once over those years but could never figure out what to say, how to navigate around the events of that last night before Eddie left. That night when he’d panicked, ran across town, his body running on a kind of autopilot. When he’d scaled the window to Eddie’s room and a few moments later found himself kissing Eddie on the mouth and then leapt out the window again to avoid the consequences, fully expecting to perhaps never see him again. There was no way around that, the implications of it, the inevitable rejection and despair. So he’d said nothing and run for it. Now, he says, “Nothing much.”

He wants to say something funny, now. Get them bantering the way they used to, Eddie simultaneously furious and fond. But he blinks and sees Eddie slumped again, blood staining his t-shirt, and any humor that exists in the world feels weak and far away. 

They crash at Mike’s place instead of the Inn that night, sharing blankets and air mattresses and couches instead of bracing against the night to return to their rooms. Richie, who knows he will lay awake regardless, is happy to relinquish the sofa to Bev and instead opts for the floor. Somewhere above his head and to the left, he can hear the soft whisper of each of Eddie’s sleeping breaths. 

He must doze off eventually because then he’s being shaken awake by a blurry figure looming over him, smelling of sweat and early morning sun. He locates his glasses and finds that the figure is Eddie, fresh back from a run and looking at him expectantly. “There’s something I want to show you,” he says.

The others are all still asleep, curled around pillows and each other, sprinkled across the furniture and the floor. The two of them step carefully around their unmoving forms, feet light, Richie trailing behind Eddie’s nimble silhouette. It feels a little illicit, somehow, the two of them slipping out like this. Richie tries to adjust his thinking until the sense of secrecy feels gentler. If he concentrates, he can make it mean almost nothing—the two of them together like this as something null and void. 

The streets are empty, the sun still not high enough to wash the streets with light. Richie shivers in the shade, walking half a step behind Eddie in order to avoid the pressure of conversation. It doesn’t feel right, this kind of silence—they once had so much to say to each other, all the time, and now to say nothing feels almost sacrilegious. 

“You’re being quiet,” Eddie says, as though reading his mind. “It’s freaking me out.”

Richie shrugs, exasperated. “You’re being quiet too.”

“It’s because you’re being quiet and throwing me off.” Eddie is still walking ahead of him, turning his head back to speak without making eye contact.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Eds, but I’ve actually had a stressful couple of days,” Richie says, pitching his voice into an extravagant whine, a parody of himself. “Not everything requires a joke at every moment. Boundaries exist.”

Eddie barks out a humorless laugh. “Since when have you ever had boundaries?”

Richie thinks about saying something else—something that would not be a joke at all. Something that would explain what it had been like beneath Neibolt when he was holding his jacket to Eddie’s chest and trying to think of something, anything, to do. To say. He has always been good at talking while saying nothing. A kind of obfuscation, a method of hiding in plain sight. But now he doesn’t have the energy for it anymore; he’s worried that if he parts his lips there will only be truth that spills out.

They’re approaching the kissing bridge, the leaves on the verdant spring trees rustling in welcome. His gut tightens when Eddie’s pace slows. The etching comes into view; he looks at it and can feel the scratch of his pen knife against the wood. He had looked furtively in both directions, positioned himself so he could run for it if he had to. He does the same now. 

“I saw it this morning,” Eddie says, stopping. “Our initials. A funny coincidence.”

His hands are on his hips. Richie can see the tattoo on his forearm: the outline of a cowboy, faded from the sun. 

“Eddie,” he begins, thinking that what will next come out of his mouth will be something funny that successfully dismisses any suspicion. A joke about Eddie’s mother, perhaps, or something up that alley that will guarantee a laugh and a quick forgetting of the discovery at all. Forgetting. They’re good at that. It’s better that way, he thinks. To leave all this behind, acknowledge the distance that so much time has created. 

Instead, he says, “I wrote that.”

Eddie makes a valiant effort to act surprised. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Richie says, and now the words won’t stop. “I don’t know if you remember but I kissed you the night before you left for Boston because I had a huge fucking crush on you for, like, years. Not to freak you out. But yeah.”

Eddie is quiet for a moment, his eyes on the bridge. “I remember the kiss. You jumped out my window.”

“Of course I did,” Richie says. “I thought you were gonna punch me in the mouth. Or worse.”

“I wouldn’t have punched you.”

He says this so quietly Richie almost doesn’t register it. He’s thinking about the kiss and the bridge carving and how they are the product of the same impulse toward release—wanting to confess without confessing. And now he’s doing it, in broad daylight, and Eddie is eerily still beside him. Richie comes back to the present. “You wouldn’t have?”

“Obviously not, dumbass,” Eddie says. “I kissed you back.”

Richie’s eyebrows shoot up. “I knew it!”

He hadn’t, not really, but he’d suspected. The years after, in Derry, he replayed that night in his mind and thought only this: maybe. Perhaps. But Eddie was still gone, and then he was too. 

“You jumped out the window,” Eddie says again, frowning. “And then I never saw you again. But I don’t think I forgot, not really. It just got buried. It feels like I’m digging all this up, like it was just beneath the surface the whole time.”

“I was going to give you this cassette with a Teen Queens song on it,” Richie says, because now it all has to come out, and as he says it he pictures again the mangled remains of the tattoo on Eddie’s back. “The song was ‘Eddie My Love.’ I guess I was trying to tell you. But then I forgot to hand it over and kissed you instead.”

Eddie’s expression has become disturbingly unreadable. He crosses his arms over his chest, chews his thumbnail, squints at their carved initials. 

“Okay, now you’re being quiet and I can only assume that it’s because you’re realizing how intensely attractive I am and have always been,” says Richie, with a confidence he does not feel. 

Eddie turns to him. It seems like he might almost be smiling. “You’re not funny.”

“Funnier than you, dickhead,” Richie says, abruptly aware of how close they are standing. On the kissing bridge, the sun high in the sky above him.

“Don’t call me a dickhead, dickhead.”

Richie is the first one to crack, a laugh bubbling out of him, a substance lighter than air. There’s some part of him that doesn’t quite believe this—that he’s standing here, confessing, and that Eddie hasn’t run for the hills. There was a time when he wasn’t sure he had any future at all, much less this one. 

“So what now?” he watches himself ask, wondering what exactly he’s asking. 

“I don’t know.” Eddie’s brow furrows into familiar lines. “But, I just—I don’t know. I was dead for a minute, down there, I think.” He jerks a thumb in the vague direction of the crater that was once the Neibolt house. “But now I’m alive. And I think that means something. I think it means something has to change.”

Richie contemplates this, wondering why he feels like he could cry again. He doesn’t know this older, tattooed, accomplished Eddie. Not like he knew the younger one, the one that kissed him back on that night in another world. But he wants to know him, all of him, and he thinks he might be getting the chance. 

On instinct, he says, “I think so too.”

Eddie reaches for his hand.


End file.
